ted, and the
great panic which might have ensued was averted by the marvellous power
of J. Pierpont Morgan.

Then the Amalgamated dividend, without warning and in open defiance of
the absolute pledges of its creators, was cut, and the public, including
even James R. Keene, found itself on that wild toboggan whirl which
landed it battered and sore, at the foot of a financial precipice.

This, briefly, is the tortuous course of Amalgamated, and it is along
this twisting, winding, up-alley-and-down-lane way I must ask my readers
to travel if they would know the story as it is.

CHAPTER II

THE "SYSTEM'S" METHOD OF FINANCE AND MANAGEMENT

At the lower end of the greatest thoroughfare in the greatest city of
the New World is a huge structure of plain gray-stone. Solid as a
prison, towering as a steeple, its cold and forbidding facade seems to
rebuke the heedless levity of the passing crowd, and frown on the
frivolity of the stray sunbeams which in the late afternoon play around
its impassive cornices. Men point to its stern portals, glance quickly
up at the rows of unwinking windows, nudge each other, and hurry onward,
as the Spaniards used to do when going by the offices of the
Inquisition. The building is No. 26 Broadway.

26 Broadway, New York City, is the home of the Standard Oil. Its
countless miles of railroads may zigzag in and out of every State and
city in America, and its never-ending twistings of snaky pipe-lines
burrow into all parts of the North American continent which are
lubricated by nature; its mines may be in the West, its manufactories in
the East, its colleges in the South, and its churches in the North; its
head-quarters may be in the centre of the universe and its branches on
every shore washed by the ocean; its untold millions may levy tribute
wherever the voice of man is heard, but its home is the tall stone
building in old New York, which under the name "26 Broadway" has become
almost as well known wherever dollars are juggled as is "Standard Oil."

Wall Street and the financial world know that there are two "Standard
Oils," but to the public there is no clear distinction between Standard
Oil, the corporation which deals in oil and things which pertain to the
manufacture and transportation of oil, and "Standard Oil," the giant,
indefinite system which sometimes embraces all the "Standard Oil" group
of individuals and corporations, and sometimes only certain of the
individuals.

Thi